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- [00:01]
Michael Kazin
In history. It's the decisions made today that shape tomorrow. So don't wait. Invest in why refi today? You can grow your wealth without the volatility of the stock market or the influence of political shifts. Yrefi offers a secure investment opportunity with up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return. No fees, just steady growth. Take control of your financial Future today. Visit investyrefi.com that's invest Y-R-E-F-Y.com or call 87780 invest to get started.
- [00:35]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens February 4, 2025 what happened to worker solidarity?
- [00:41]
Michael Kazin
This is about people power and it's about occupying not merely a square, but it's about occupying our authority to be in charge of the future.
- [00:51]
J.D. Vance
CEO pay has gone up enormously since 1990. The average worker's pay has only gone up by 4%.
- [00:57]
Michael Kazin
It is time to put an end to anti union activities. They are illegal power grabs by anti labor special interest.
- [01:04]
J.D. Vance
We're done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We'll commit to the working man.
- [01:10]
Martin DeCaro
The presence and power of labor unions are not what they used to be, and as a consequence, workers have lost a collective sense of solidarity to stand up for their rights as workers in our capitalist world. Both major political parties talk a lot about fighting for the working class, invoking the rhetoric of economic populists from America's past. Can worker solidarity exist without unions? That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:38]
Michael Kazin
I'm a historian of social movements. And the sad truth about social movements is that they usually have a period when they surge, when they're gaining support, then they consolidate for a while, often with political support. Inevitably, they decline, and they very seldom come back in anything like the kind of strength they had before. So unions have been in decline for in the private sector, especially for a good 50 years and more so to expect them all of a sudden to surge again, especially with a administration now in power which is hostile to they weren't surging very much under Biden's administration. They're unlikely to surge now under Trump. So it's a sad thing. But workers might have to who want to organize collectively, who want to better the conditions, will have to do it in other ways.
- [02:22]
Martin DeCaro
The last time I can remember, Americans came together to say they've had enough of the ridiculous wealth disparities in our country, what some call a rigged system. Or maybe this attitude was captured by the slogan they bailed out Wall street, not Main street, was during the aftermath of the Great Recession. In the Occupy movement, corporate greed has got to go.
- [02:49]
Michael Kazin
We're tired of begging Congress for favors, and we're tired of asking the rich for crops.
- [02:54]
Martin DeCaro
Ho ho. Corporate greed is not to go. The Occupy encampments in New York, Washington and elsewhere got people talking about underlying problems. Economic inequality, corporate greed, the influence of money in politics, big structural issues. About 10 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure in those years. And how many financial executives went to prison? Basically none. Not saying any should have. The point is, there was serious public anger over the fundamental unfairness seemingly built into American capitalism. Here is an Associated Press report from 2011.
- [03:32]
J.D. Vance
While CEO pay has gone up enormously since 1990, the average worker's pay has only gone up by 4%. And many people don't have any jobs at all. The unemployment rate is 9%. That number jumps to 17% if we take into account people who can only find part time work or those who've simply stopped looking. All the while, upward social mobility has been on the decline. And in other words, your parents and grandparents had a better chance than you do of climbing the income scale. And in the minds of many of these protesters who've taken to the streets, that's worth fighting to change.
- [04:06]
Martin DeCaro
I covered the Occupy K Street protests here in Washington as a local reporter, and I can remember the sense of solidarity in the air. Protestors believe they had an opportunity to change society for the better. Well, the Occupy movement faded away, as most protest movements do. But if it left an enduring legacy, it was injecting the words income inequality into mainstream political discourse. Still today, to cite one lack of progress, the union membership rate in the private sector remains at about 6%. Now. In 2021, the U.S. house, then controlled by Democrats, passed the PRO act, taking aim at anti union right to work laws. Here's a taste of the debate on the House floor. Democrats were for it, Republicans mostly against it.
- [04:54]
J.D. Vance
When workers can stand together and form a union, they have the ability to.
- [04:57]
Martin DeCaro
Use their collective voice for fair wages.
- [05:00]
J.D. Vance
Safe working conditions, improved health benefits and a more secure retirement.
- [05:05]
Michael Kazin
The bill is nothing more than a payoff to union bosses at the expense of the American workers and our businesses. This bill would abolish state's right to work like mine in Tennessee. This would force workers to give money to unions from their hard earned paychecks, even if they don't want union representation.
- [05:23]
Martin DeCaro
The PRO act got nowhere in the Senate because of the filibuster. It would have protected workers seeking to form a union from retribution. Or firing strengthened the government's power to punish employers who violate workers rights. It would have banned those mandatory meetings where your boss can make you watch or read anti union propaganda. Now today there is a big debate over which political party is the true champion of the working man. Here's Vice President J.D. vance. When he was a candidate campaigning last year, he was asked about the pro Act.
- [05:57]
J.D. Vance
The problem with the pro act is in some ways it doubles down on a lot of the failed things that we've done. Instead of looking at American labor policy as something that's going to be better for the 21st century than it was in the 20th century, if you actually. And look, I believe in the right of workers to unionize if they choose to do so. But private sector union participation went from about 33% when my papaw was a union steel worker. He was actually a WELDER Just like Bill. 33% to now it's about 7%. So we have to ask ourselves what public policies have we enacted that have driven private sector union participation? I don't think we double down on what's on the failed model. We got to think about a new model for the 21st century because that's going to be better for American workers, it's going to be better for American companies, and most importantly, it's going to mean higher pay for people who work hard and play by the rules. And that's what Donald Trump and I are all about.
- [06:54]
Martin DeCaro
His boss, President Donald Trump, also talks a lot about helping workers by say, lowering prices or deporting migrants who Trump says are taking Americans jobs.
- [07:04]
Michael Kazin
Today, our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. By the way, you know who's taking the jobs? The jobs that are created, 107% of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.
- [07:21]
Martin DeCaro
And Trump also likes to point out that union rank and file often support him.
- [07:25]
Michael Kazin
We will build automobiles in America again at a rate that nobody could have dreamt possible just a few years ago. And thank you to the auto workers of our nation for your inspiring vote of confidence. We did tremendously with their vote.
- [07:41]
Martin DeCaro
But neither he nor JD Vance seem to support strengthening labor unions. We'll see which policies they back over the next four years. The origins of labor organizing go back to the early 1800s. As G. William Domhoff at the University of California, Santa Cruz writes, these early forms of labor organizations were largely mutual aid societies or craft guilds. Craft workers were relatively few in number and most companies were small. But industrial development in the early 19th century slowly widened the gap between employers and skilled workers, so the workers began to think of industrial factories as a threat to both their wages and status. They soon formed fledgling craft unions. In an attempt to resist sudden wage cuts, longer working hours and unsafe working conditions, while also protecting their political, social and economic rights, they developed a sense of solidarity as workers, Domhoff goes on to say most of these unions were local in scope. But as both labor and product markets became more national due to improvements in transportation, and as employers continued to decrease wages and deskill jobs, those workers came to believe that they would have to organize on a wider basis if they were to be effective. But they faced enormous resistance from employers and had little success until the 1890s. In the 1830s, almost 200 years ago, the new labor leader spoke out against increasingly frequent claims by the publicists of the day, building on the ideas of Adam Smith that the new economic conditions were simply due to abstract and neutral economic laws, which of course became a familiar refrain for employers and all those social scientists who think that it's all about free markets and not at all about power, domhoff says. In contrast to the story told by free market advocates, the union activists asserted that they had been dispossessed, which they cast as a threat to the United States as a republic because it stripped them of their rights and independence as free white male citizens. The defense of labor, says Domhoff, was thereby equated with the defense of American Republican government. Now, does your typical wage earner today see himself or herself that way? You know, in the early 20th century, the wobblies of the IWW brought a radical mindset to labor organizing. As a revolutionary organization dedicated to controlling the means of production, the Wobblies rejected capitalism and their tactics often led to arrests and sensational publicity. Like Occupy Wall street, the Wobblies quickly faded into obscurity. But what's important to recognize in all of this is there was once a time in our country, not very long ago, when the conflict between capital and labor drove the political thinking of millions of Americans. It was front of mind the notion that powerful companies or billionaires could be trusted to safeguard workers interests. Well, such a notion would have been considered insane. Michael Kazin is a distinguished historian of American political and social movements at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, most recently what It Took to Win A History of the Democratic Party. Welcome back to the podcast.
- [11:03]
Michael Kazin
Great to be here Martin.
- [11:04]
Martin DeCaro
Whenever I have to do a podcast about labor, you come to mind. And you are now writing a book about Samuel Gompers, how's it going?
- [11:13]
Michael Kazin
Pretty good. It's actually Samuel Gompers and the rise of the American Labor Movement more generally. I'm writing about other labor leaders too. Some of them rivals, like some in the iww, which we'll talk about today.
- [11:23]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, we're going to talk about the Wobblies. This idea popped into my head because of one of my listeners. I put out a chat on Substack. Hey everybody, any subjects you want me to cover in the New year? And somebody said, why don't you do something about the iww? But I didn't just want to do a podcast that, you know, that's the equivalent of an encyclopedia entry. Anyone can just read about the iww. I want to make it relevant because we are fresh off an election that raised a very important question. Which party is the real party of the blue collar worker? What kind of policies would such a party get behind? What future does organized labor have in the United States when many of the new organizing efforts are taking place in the service sector where workers don't have a lot of loyalty to the company? Maybe they're just going to do this as a part time job for a year or two. They're working at Starbucks. Why do we need to unionize? I don't even care about this job. Just doing to make money to get through college. Why don't we talk about the big picture right here and this notion of the place of the worker in our politics, in our society. Worker solidarity, does it exist?
- [12:27]
Michael Kazin
Well, it certainly exists among some workers. When workers are in unions, unions, they believe, help them. The unions do inspire breed sense of collective spirit. They're all in this together. We're all in this together against the boss. That's very important. It's not just solidarity among oneself, one fellow workers. There's also solidarity in opposition to an employer who you believe wants to pay as little as possible and make as large profits as possible. But you know, the problem of the working class, which has never been one united group of people anyway, of course, in the very heterogeneous country that we live in, is that unions were strong 60 years ago. 70 years ago represented about 35% of the labor force in the mid-1950s, and that's before public workers were organized in any great numbers. Now it's down to 10%. Private sector workers down to 6%. So unions are not a reality in the lives of most workers. They know they exist, but they have not been members of a union usually. Sometimes their parents were members of a union. That's a big difference. The union culture that used to exist in America through much of the 20th century only exists in various pockets of the land today. One of the things that means is that working class people get educated about politics, not through unions as many of them actually did, which were educational institutions as well as economic institutions. They get educated through, you know, the Internet especially. Of course, they get attracted to charismatic politicians like Donald Trump very often who promise to transform a system utterly and to do things that working people will like. But usually that means more cultural issues and economic issues. Because Trump, for example, one of the first things that he did when he took office last week, he fired the Democratic appointed member of the National Labor Relations Board and also the attorney for the National Labor Relations Board. In other words, the most pro union people in the government were fired by Donald Trump. People whose job it was to try to make sure that if workers want a union, the workers can get a union. In short, workers are split because they're very cynical about politicians. They feel they've been losing ground economically, and they have in many ways for the last few decades. At the same time, they don't have many faith in institutions that can help them. Unions, for a lot of people, used to be that kind of institution. And for most people, those unions don't exist anymore.
- [14:47]
Martin DeCaro
So when it came to the wobblies, and we'll get to them in a little bit, I just want to raise this point. They wanted all workers to think of themselves as equals and the same. They didn't like the AFL because they. The AFL was categorizing workers depending on what they were doing. The wobblies wanted there to be true solidarity among all workers, regardless of their jobs, and that didn't work. But to your point about what it means to be a worker in this country, I may have shared with you an article from Dissent magazine. I think you've heard of Dissent magazine. Michael Kazin.
- [15:17]
Michael Kazin
I used to be the editor. Yes.
- [15:18]
Martin DeCaro
Leo Casey wrote an article in there about how the power of disruption, or the power of workers to disrupt the power dynamic between capital and labor is not equal. I mentioned Starbucks at the very top of this conversation. Not to pick on Starbucks. I do have a sister who works there part time. What he meant was that some workers in certain industries have more power to disrupt than others. So if you're at a strategic point in, say, the assembly process or an economic choke point like a major port, right. You're a dock worker at a major port. When you go on strike, you can Have a real. Make a real difference there. But if you're a barista at Starbucks and you decide one morning, you know what? I'm not going to fill these coffee cups anymore.
- [16:01]
Michael Kazin
Yeah. And the irony there is that Starbucks workers are among the most avid pro union workers in America today, despite the fact that most of them aren't going to be around long. And that's not because, well, they are badly exploited. I'm sure they don't get paid very well. And actually, Starbucks executives are going to court to try to rule the National Labor Relations act unconstitutional along with a guy named Elon Musk. They're doing it together along with Amazon as well. But they are young people, most of them college educated, and they are pro union because they're progressive generally in their politics. And to be progressive now means to be pro union, which it did not actually several years ago, but it does now. And so even though they won't be around long, they're pro union because they believe in economic equality. And of course, they believe in getting better pay themselves, even though, as you note, five years from now, hardly any of them are still going to be there. At least they hope they're not going to be there. What made unions strong when they were really strong is they were in the manufacturing industries in America. They were in auto, they were in steel, they were, as you said, in longshore, they were in meatpacking. They were in the basic industries of America when America was an industrial country. And so when they took part in big strikes, as they did in 1930s and 1940s, the employers tended to settle with them after a while because they understood that these big industries would decline drastically and they'd make many fewer profits if they did not settle with the workers. So there was a real incentive because the workers were so central to the economy. And now, yes, Starbucks workers are not central to the economy. Amazon warehouse workers are somewhat more central to the economy. But again, you can replace them more easily. And that's one of the reasons we'll get into this. Why the ffl, under Samuel Gomper's leadership, he was the leader of the FFL for almost 40 years, believed in organizing craft workers first because he believed that craft workers were more indispensable to the economy. They understood how to make the goods, you know, and without that skill, the factories couldn't operate either. That's one of the reasons why I think the FFL lasted in a way the IWW didn't. But again, we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.
- [17:57]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, yeah. The craft guilds in the early 1800s. Well, that's well before Gompers, but they were the first union labor organizing efforts in U.S. history. Has to happen after industrialization. You know, you mentioned Elon Musk there. I know I'm bouncing around a little bit here. I was gonna talk about labor ideology, but I did mention the election at the very start of this. What it means to be pro worker today. Right. So I look up at Trump's inauguration and who do I see up there? Musk, the meta Facebook guy. What's his name? Zuckerberg? Bezos. Billionaires. I see people who are notorious anti union figures. We all know how Bezos feels about unions. Amazon, or how he felt when he was running the company. Not sure what his title is anymore, but you get my point. The vibe, pardon the expression. What's best for workers is what's best for billionaires. And this is a phony populism. We've talked about populism before the late 19th century early populist movement. Regular people need to come together because they're being stiffed by powerful economic interests in this country. In those days it was the railroads. Today we have a new administration that champions the modern day railroad barons. I mean, it's backwards.
- [19:09]
Michael Kazin
Yeah. And also of course, one of the things that that Musk is, is trying to do with Doge and, and all by himself, it sounds like too, even beyond that, is to get as many federal workers who are in unions for the most part to leave their jobs so they can get Trump loyalists and must loyalists in those same positions who will, one assumes, not be as pro union as the, as the workers who are, who are leaving or who will be fired.
- [19:31]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I mean there's this idea out there that the billionaires are being put upon.
- [19:35]
Michael Kazin
Well, this goes back to what I was saying before, is that, you know, how do people get their politics, how do working people get their politics out of any place get their politics? You know, you get it through people you trust. Well, working people who are in unions used to trust the unions actually to not all of them, but the better unions to educate them. There were meetings all the time. There were union newspapers, union newsletters. People found a community in their unions. And if you trust people you work with and you trust the leaders of your local union especially as well as leaders of the national union, you tend to trust them about politics as well as advice about what to do at the workplace. And when it comes to conflicts with the boss, and when those don't exist, people tend to look to folks who will provide them answers. And Trump's a billionaire too. But Trump won a majority of votes of people who didn't go to college, which is how most pollsters define working class these days, which has its problems, but it's a, a rough, a rough estimate because most of those people didn't love Trump, but they were turned off by Biden. They were turned off by the idea that they thought they were losing jobs, steadily good jobs to Mexico and to other, to China. They look to someone who seems to have a clear analysis of why that happened. And Trump, to its credit, I hate to give him credit for anything, but Trump to his credit, gave people a very clear explanation why things were as bad as they are. For a lot of those people, it was inaccurate in most cases, but it was at least clear, whereas Democrats didn't give them a clear explanation. It's not just messaging. It's also the fact that the institutions that used to support Democrats, unions, especially in giving people that kind of education, are so weak. Now.
- [21:11]
Martin DeCaro
It's important to clarify that when I'm talking about workers here, I'm not talking about, I don't know, podcast hosts or well educated. That's not me, master's degree, I don't have one of those either. But you know, well educated master's degree white collar workers who are very well paid and probably very happy with their job may be happy with the state of American capitalism. Talking about blue collar working class, as you say, non college educated wage earners in this country who used to be parts of powerful labor unions or used to be organized in industrial skilled industries. So labor ideology, you're sense in this power dynamic between capital and labor. I have a post here from G. William Domhoff at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He wrote a post called who Rules America? About labor unionism, labor organizing. He talks about a post industrial revolution when workers finally started to consider that the new economic conditions were not just due to abstract neutral economic laws, which was what employers used to say when they cut their hours or cut their wages. Sorry, this is the free market at work. There's nothing you can do about this abstract neutral economic laws. Instead it was really more about power and what employers thought they needed.
- [22:26]
Michael Kazin
No, yeah, it's definitely true. And Domhoff, who was a great sociologist of American society, put his finger on something very important I think is that, is that if those who run the society are able to get across the idea that the rules of society, the only way to run a society is with employers, be able to do whatever they want with their workforce, hire and fire, not have to worry about signing union contracts, be able to shift their businesses overseas or south of the border whenever they want to that. If that is considered normal and good, then it's very difficult to mount resistance to it. But if workers or anybody else believes, no, that's not the way it has to be. This is the way it was set up by people in power because it's to their benefit. And we have to resist that. Not just by going on strike or going to the streets or voting for labor candidates for office, but also by challenging that logic, by challenging that idea that this is the way it's got to be. That's essential. Any social movement has to do that. Abolitionists did that about slavery. Anti war movements did it about the military and about wars that were unjust. And the same thing happens with, with labor.
- [23:34]
Martin DeCaro
So I'm going to skip most of the 19th century here. I will share Domhoff's post in my weekly newsletter. He says, after 1877, American labor relations were the most violent in the Western world, with the exception of Russia. So early 20th century, 1905, we get this group established. I'm not sure anyone knows where the term wobblies comes from, but it was the iww. So, Michael Kazin, what led to the establishment of iww? What does IWW stand for? What was happening in the labor movement at that time that led to the establishment of this group?
- [24:14]
Michael Kazin
It stands for the Industrial Workers of the World. Sometimes people make a mistake called International Workers of the World, which of course would be redundant. But anyway, it was founded in 1905 at a convention in Chicago. And it was organized really as a radical alternative to the existing Federation of American Workers, which was the American Federation of Labor, which had been established in the 1880s, which had about 2 million members by that point. But the American Federation of Labor did a pretty good job of organizing skilled workers, at least some skilled workers. Cigar makers, carpenters, bricklayers, mine workers, who are both industrial workers and craft workers and various other crafts in America, but had not done a good job organizing workers in the major industries in the country. Steel workers, very few of them were organized. Very few lumber workers were organized. For example, the Industrial Workers of the World was founded by radicals, by socialists, in many cases, also by anarchists, who believed that the only way to liberate workers from capitalism was not to tick around the edges as they saw the FFL was doing, not just to sign up craft workers who were indispensable to the operating of the American economy, but were not the majority of workers in America. It was to organize all workers into one big union. The OBU was often a synonym for the iww. Leading socialists like Eugene Debs were supportive of them, at least at first. And then they went out to try to do what they promised to do. Their motto in the preamble to the constitution was pretty stark. It was, the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. Nothing in common. Yeah.
- [25:52]
Martin DeCaro
They wanted to overthrow capitalism. Right. Or they did not accept capitalism.
- [25:55]
Michael Kazin
Exactly. You can't accept anything, and you can't accept even the fact that these two groups are part of the same country. So it was a grand, grand ambition. And also, more and more, the IWW leaders believed in something that actually was different from socialism. It was something that historians like me call anarcho syndicalism. Anarcho syndicalism. They wanted a future society which would not have a state, would not have a government above the working people, above the people in general. So in other words, it would be anarchist, but it wouldn't just be little communities of people organizing their lives however they want to, which is what anarchists believed at the time. It would be syndicalist. That is, it comes from the French word for union. The unions would run the society. The society would be run from the point of production. Steel workers would decide how the steel industry would run, and then they would help to decide how communities would run and so forth. So this was a grand vision. It was one that was hostile to politics, actually. It believed that the only good society is one that was run by workers themselves, without having to worry about elections and politicians, bureaucracy, all this. So it was a very optimistic vision, really, if you think about it, because it believed that people didn't really knew the government. They could run their own affairs from the workplace, from their unions.
- [27:13]
Martin DeCaro
An injury to one is an injury to all was their motto. You should collectively own your local Starbucks franchise and, and run it yourself and decide, you know, your hours and how many cups of coffee you're going to pour in an hour. You know what I'm, what I'm getting at here, but, you know, I mentioned before, not very articulately about this idea as a worker, that your fate is not simply left to the fickle finger of the free market, that this is about power. I mean, yes, the free market or the marketplace does exist. I don't want to say there are no neutral or impersonal forces at work in the global economy today. They probably had a lot to say about that as well. The iww, Sure.
- [27:50]
Michael Kazin
I mean, their basic analysis was Marxist. The basic analysis was capitalism is an exploitative system at its core. Workers will always get a raw deal from employers because employers are thinking of their own interests. They want to, you know, grow their companies and make as large profits as possible and gobble up as many other companies as they can. And so it's never in the interest of the workers. The IW said to negotiate with the employers, maybe in a very temporary basis, but that's one of the things that the wobblies also believe, which actually is one of the things that in the end hurt them very much from growing very large, is they didn't believe in signing contracts. They didn't believe in saying for three years we won't go on strike. They felt whenever we're powerful enough to go on strike and better our conditions, they said to workers, you should do it. So in that sense, they were. They were anarchists too. They didn't believe in rules under capital society. They thought all rules, all contracts made in capitalist society were inevitably exploitative, inevitably would hurt the worker. And so you shouldn't do it. To sign contracts gave workers an illusion that they were getting something and when in fact this was just a momentary temporary concession their employers were making because they were so powerful and wobbly. Said to stay powerful, you have to threaten to strike whenever you can.
- [29:04]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. Their constitution or the preamble says there could be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life. You know, I did mention Musk and Bezos, and I hope people don't think I'm a Marxist over here. I'm just trying to raise ideas, trying to re establish the thinking of the time. I'm not saying I endorse these ideas or these notions. As you say, the IWW was Marxist, just trying to draw out Professor Kazan here so he can explain the. The milieu, if you will, in which the IWW existed and how they tried to shape history themselves. But they opposed U.S. participation in World War I, and that was a bad idea, at least for them.
- [29:47]
Michael Kazin
Well, that goes along again with the radical view of World War I at the time, which is just an imperialist war between different empires. United States joins it late in the war in April 1917, almost three years after World War I began. But the Socialist Party opposed the war as well in this country and was repressed because of it. The IW actually didn't ever formally say we're against World War I. They basically just said, we're going to keep doing what we're doing anyway. And they thought they had more success because there was pretty much full employment during World War I, as there is in many big wars, most big wars in American history. And so they felt they had more leverage, the workers have more leverage to go on strike and get what they wanted. The problem problem is they were seen as a revolutionary force and it was clear that they were opposing the war because they agreed to go on strike. Whereas the FFL unions had a no strike pledge for the duration of the war. So the courts and legislatures went after them. They passed laws called criminal syndicalist laws, which made it a crime to use violence or the threat of violence to overthrow the government. Well, IWW was not exactly trying to overthrow the government specifically, but didn't matter, of course, the law was on the books and hundreds of IWW members were put in jail, convicted and put in jail for basically going on strike, or at least the officials of the IWW by organizing people to go on strike during the war. And there were huge, over 101 IWW leaders were put on a federal trial in 1919, and they were almost all convicted. The most important leader of the iww, guy named Big Bill Haywood, a former copper miner, escaped from jail and went to the the Soviet Union, where he died in the early 1920s. The opposition to the war, and I would argue the more general, too radical for American society posture of the iww, made the IW into what I've called in one of my books, Beautiful Losers. They had a wonderful vision of people, workers organizing their lives by themselves, for themselves. But most workers are not revolutionaries. Most workers never joined the iww. And IWW put itself in a very precarious position by not signing contracts and by continuing to go on strike during World War I. And they had no way really to defend themselves in a serious way against all these prosecutions. So by the early 1920s, the IWW survived, but it was just a shell of its former self and it never has recovered.
- [32:04]
Martin DeCaro
And most workers wanted to make capitalism work better for them. They didn't want to take over their companies. They wanted their companies to give them a better deal or a new deal. You know, we did an episode once. People can search for this episode wherever they find this podcast. The name of it is Strike, where we talked about the famous strikes of the 20th century and how important those were to what we've been discussing here, the power dynamic between capital and labor. You didn't have to be a communist to understand this. Right. But as we were saying here, most workers didn't want to just overthrow the whole thing. They wanted simply to work better for themselves. So we're going to talk now and draw a contrast between the IWW and the AFL. The AFL was founded in early December 1886. By 1892, the AFL had 40 unions. According to G. William Domhoff, whose post I'm citing here, most of them had a few thousand members. Carpenters, 57,000 typographers, 28,000 cigar makers, 27,000 iron and steel workers, iron molders. They were the five largest unions in the country. The cigar makers, one of the largest unions in the country in the late 19th century. I would have gotten that wrong if I were on Jeopardy.
- [33:17]
Michael Kazin
Well, you know, if you were, if you were a real man back in the 1890s, you smoked cigars.
- [33:21]
Martin DeCaro
So what did the AFL do right where the IWW screwed up the FML.
- [33:26]
Michael Kazin
What they did right. And of course they did not become the massive federation that together with the CIO they were by the 1950s, when they had 35% of the labor force, as I mentioned. But what they did well is they, they knew how to organize unions, which stayed organized, which stayed around. Institutions matter only if they are durable. And the IWW is not durable. So basically what the AFL believed in is something that Samuel Gompert has called pure and simple unionism. You can have any politics you want. Socialists were in the AFL unions. Sometimes they're the head of various AFL unions. Sometimes anarchists were as well. You could be for the war against the war. What mattered was organizing your particular group of workers to demand particular things from your particular bosses and to have enough resources in your treasury from dues, initiation fees in order to last out a strike, a long strike if necessary, and to win that strike. So very practical goals pursued in a very practical way. Now, there was a larger vision here. I mean, the motto of the AFL was labor omnia vincit in Latin, labor conquers all. They wanted all workers to be in unions, all workers of all races, all workers of all of all genders, or men and women, only genders then that were talked about. But they believed in doing it step by step, not in taking risks, spending a lot of time on strike and then losing that strike. And of course, important to remember, and this is something that I think we've talked about in the past, but important to remember how anti union, how viciously anti union most employers were at the time, they did not just believe that they wanted to, you know, defeat unions. They they wanted to make unions impossible. For example, there were various court cases in the early 20th century, the FFL was involved and not the IWW, in which the national association of Manufacturers, other anti union groups, brought suit against unions for violating the antitrust act of 1890 of the Clayton Antitrust Act. Now, the Antitrust act was originally passed to restrain big companies from gobbling up other other companies. And that's what a trust is, after all, a monopoly in a particular industry. But unions, when they went on strike or supported boycotts of companies that were whose unions were on strike, courts decreed that just by supporting a boycott, just by picketing, unions were restraining trade. It was conspiracy to restrain trade. And so Samuel Gompers was in danger of going to jail for a couple of years because in the American Federationist, the AFL magazine, he put out an ad saying, we don't patronize a particular company called Buck Stove and Range Company, a big range and stove maker in the Middle West. The head of that company had very smart lawyers. He went to court and he got the FFL and joined from just putting out an ad saying don't patronize his company. And that kind of thing happened all over the country. There also were anti union police forces and thugs who beat up men and women on strike, happen all the time, or killed them. Guard was called up to break strikes in many cases around the country. So it wasn't just, as Domhoff mentioned, you mentioned before, that the American industrial relations were more violent than they were in any other country in the world, except perhaps Russia at the time, late 19th, early 20th century. It's also that the whole system, political and legal system, was against union organizing. And so the FFL had a very difficult time making any headway. And that's part of the reason why Gompers and his fellow leaders believed you have to be very careful when you go on strike, very careful when you say you're going to challenge the bosses that you can actually win.
- [36:52]
Martin DeCaro
Imagine today how you would feel if you saw a segment on your local news. Some workers at the local fill in the blank service sector retail place were picketing outside their store and they're on the sidewalk there, picket line and a bunch of private detectives or whoever, group of thugs with baseball bats or the National Guard comes and beats the living daylights out of them. You'd be saying, what kind of country is this? Well, that was Commonplace, even complex, with women.
- [37:19]
Michael Kazin
I mean I just writing this chapter in my book on Gompers and the rise of the American labor movement about the famous strike by, by shirtwaist workers, women in early 20th century New York. Police brought in friends of theirs who were thugs, who were bullies to beat up these women. And also they enlisted, they paid money to prostitutes, female prostitutes, to beat up the women as well.
- [37:40]
Martin DeCaro
On the factory floor at Ford, or was it General Motors? I don't want to slander anyone here. One of the major auto manufacturers in the 20th century, they had some guy going around doing corporal punishment if you weren't working fast enough. Amazing. To wrap up here, Michael Kazin, Leo Casey, who I mentioned before, wrote unions provided much of the political muscle behind the social democratic programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. Not coincidentally, these decades of labor movement potency were the period that economists call the great leveling in which wealth disparities in the United States were brought down to their lowest point since the start of the Industrial Revolution. You know, I don't like to use terms like ruling class or plutocrats or this or that because then people think I sound crazy. But those terms are accurate. We do have a new ruling class today. Elon Musk is a plutocrat. He has used his enormous personal wealth to obtain political power. That's the definition of plutocracy. But with so many industries today, so many jobs not conducive to organizing, to unionization, I'm not sure where the worker solidarity is going to come from, where the political muscle of labor is going to be seen and influence the direction of national policy, say, or just the economy. I'm grasping to see how we're going to reverse this very long running trend of, what is it, 6% of private sector people are in unions. You know, without unions, can there be worker solidarity?
- [39:09]
Michael Kazin
Well, that's a great question. One of the things we haven't talked about, it's a complicated question, is about how important it has been historically for to have government support for unionizing. What Leo Casey points out there is the New deal. From the 30s to the late 60s, early 70s, even under Republicans, there was a lot of support for institutions, especially the National Labor Relations Board, which was set up in the 1930s to give workers a union to have hold union elections for workers who say they want to have a union. That power has eroded seriously over the last few years. Over the last decades, Starbucks workers, for example, who have voted to join a union in various Starbucks stores don't have a union contract yet. Why not? Because the employers can delay and delay and delay negotiating with them. And you can say you want a union unless you have a contract. The union doesn't mean much. It just means, hey, I'm a union member. But you don't get anything positive out of that relationship unless you have a contract.
- [40:05]
Martin DeCaro
Employers don't want to be bound by a document that says you have to do this for the next three or four years.
- [40:11]
Michael Kazin
Exactly. And you know, Democrats passed in the House something called the PRO act when Biden had a majority in the House and would have passed in the Senate when they had a majority, except for the filibuster rule. And the PRO act would penalize employers rather heavily for not negotiating in a certain period of time with their workers. Also, it would make it possible to have a union set up if majority of workers say they want to join one without having then an election process in which very often employers force workers to listen to anti union propaganda during their work time, during their working hours. So, but that didn't pass. And so as a result, it's not surprising that more workers, especially the private sector, don't join unions because it's very difficult to go against that sort of structure built up over time, which makes it very difficult to actually get a union contract, even if you want a Union. You know, 70% of Americans have said in recent polls they like the idea of unions, but that's a little bit liking the idea of a sunny day. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't get you anything.
- [41:08]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. Would you like a vanilla ice cream cone in summer? Yeah, of course. Sure.
- [41:12]
Michael Kazin
Yeah. So, and it's a, it's a real problem. I mean, I, I'm a historian of social movements, and the sad truth about social movements is that they usually have a period when they surge, when they're gaining support, then they consolidate for a while, often with political support. Inevitably they decline and they very seldom come back in anything like the kind of strength they had before. So unions have been in decline in the private sector, especially for a good 50 years and more. So to expect them all of a sudden to surge again, especially with a administration now in power which is hostile to them. They weren't surging very much under Biden's administration. They're unlikely to surge now under Trump. So it's a sad thing. But workers might have to, who want to organize collectively, you want to better the conditions, will have to do it in other ways. I don't want to speculate what those other ways are. People find ways to Assert their interests, to demand their interests. But without institutions that are durable, it's very hard to do that in any kind of powerful way.
- [42:09]
Martin DeCaro
I've worked in union shops and I've worked in non union jobs most of my career. Non union jobs. And generally speaking, I prefer the union shop, but they're not perfect either. You mentioned that not everyone wants to join a union. In some of these places, the votes are often very close.
- [42:24]
Michael Kazin
The value of unions is it gives you a sense of, it gives you some degree of democracy at the workplace, some sense of, I'm working at this place, I should have something to say about how it works, about the conditions of my work. That's all. It's just a basically, sometimes small, sometimes large degree of economic democracy. We believe in democracy politically, but unions give people potentially a sense of democracy at the place where they work 8, 10, sometimes more hours a day.
- [42:50]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, the power of collective bargaining. I can go into the boss's office by myself and I always have. I've never been shy about asking for raises, but you got a better chance to get a raise when you have the power of collective bargaining. And I said I would end, I would end with a editorial comment. Michael Gazin, there's really nothing to worry about here. We'll just wait for the wealth to trickle down. Isn't that the message you're getting? I mean, that's the message I'm getting.
- [43:16]
Michael Kazin
Yeah, sure, sure. And of course, yeah, you didn't see.
- [43:19]
Martin DeCaro
Big Bill Haywood up there on Trump's inauguration. There were no labor leaders up there.
- [43:23]
Michael Kazin
No, but look, I mean, the brilliance for Trump, and I have to give him some credit, he understands he needs to talk to working people without condescending to them. And he did mention the auto workers in his inauguration, even though he didn't mention the auto workers union. So it's a classic move by conservatives like Trump to appeal to working people, but to oppose their unions. If he can do that successfully, he'll be able to keep working people in the Republican coalition, at least those who are in the publican coalition now. But we'll have to see whether he's successful doing that because as you say, there were no union leaders in the choice seats behind him or even any of the seats behind him. At his inaugural address. I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American, American workers and families. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.
- [44:28]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History. As it happens, in his inaugural address in 1989, President George Bush said the day of the dictator is over. Would any statesman say that today? Is democracy really on the retreat? Are we seeing a rise of authoritarianism that resembles the darkest chapters of, say, Europe's history 100 years ago? We'll tackle that big topic next as we report history as it happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up free@historyasithappens.com.